M. Kuzmin is one of the few poets of the early XX century whose lack of connection with the literary canon does not lead, like his colleagues, to loud rebellion (See: Markov V. F. On freedom in poetry: articles, essays, miscellaneous. St. Petersburg, 1994, pp. 27-47). However, the poet, being in the very center of poetic search, remains free to choose individual means of artistic expression.

We put forward a thesis about the paradoxical nature of Kuzmin's poetics. The desire of the artist of the word, as on a cubist canvas, to depict the world in all its manifestations simultaneously forces the poet to violate the rules and laws of grammar and vocabulary (it is not by chance that O. E. Mandelstam spoke of the" deliberate negligence " of the poet).

We should not forget that in some periods of his work Kuzmin uses the Zaumi technique and writes poems in the style of "nonsense "(for example, "Pskov August"), and his short stories of the 1920s, such as "Blue Nothing", "Five Conversations and one Incident", "The Stove in the Bathhouse" come closer to poetics See: Gheron G. Mixail Kuzmin and the Oberiuty: an Overview // Wiener slawistischer Almanach. Wien, 1983. Bd. 12. S. 87-101).

By language paradoxes, we mean various types of semantic and syntactic transformations of the poetic language that lead to a violation of the semantic uniformity of the text, a deliberate violation of logical connections and, thereby, expand the view of the text.

The traditional means of breaking the semantic uniformity of a text is antonymy. Kuzmin actively uses antonyms as the main lexical way of expressing antitheses:

Ah, am I, dark one, I will enter that bright garden; Louder and sweeter is the silence of my lips, / Than the grandeur / Of sonorous Choirs; Sadness with hope hands sniffle; The victim and the murderer mingle wonderfully; Who will confirm love with separation?; A terrible angel in a sweet face is imagined to me; Poison is poisoned-peaceful waves (Here and further cit. by: Kuzmin M. Stikhi. SPb., 1996).

Kuzmin performs mirror transformations of strings using antonymic pairs: Infidelities here are for reconciliation, / And reconciliation is for infidelity.

Usually the names of such phenomena and objects are contrasted,

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which are correlative, belong to the same category of objective reality as mutually exclusive concepts. Kuzmin includes such names in syntactic constructions of the same type - antonyms occupy the positions of homogeneous members of the sentence (definitions, additions, circumstances, predicates) and are connected by a compositional connection (union or non-union), sometimes they are included in comparative phrases. The discrepancy between the grammatical and semantic development of the stanza, supported by the parallelism of the verse lines, creates the effect of deceived expectations:

I'm not a singer - I hear your sounds,

They contain everything: hell, heaven, snow, passion, and torment.

Most often, the poet uses antonymic definitions of one object or phenomenon: Sometimes shameless, sometimes bashful / Kisses all ebb; And here you are [ancestors] cry out in hundreds of voices, / lost, but alive; A long way, you are unbearable and desirable to me; And the city subsided, / Near, but far away; I will never meet you , / And maybe I will meet you again; My sadness is persistent and stupid - in this example of the ironic allusion to "quasi-synonymous" definitions is persistent and tupa, as well as the defined word sadness, enter into a sound interaction (p-up-up).

In some cases, antonymous pairs rise to symbols: "To be born again, you must die," the poet believes.

Kuzmin uses the technique of "imaginary" juxtaposition. For example, words such as unfaithful and cute, which would be contrasted in normal contexts, are synonymized with Kuzmin:

Under the cap, the look of unfaithful, sweet eyes; Sweet hands, unfaithful eyes, / Beloved lips; the look of unfaithful, sweet eyes; Let's get everything we need, / And life is boiling and dead; The wizard is strange and charming; A terrible, sweet dream...; But the heart remembered, the heart knew, / And to him it was sweet and hurtful; And there was love and anxiety in my heart; The architect built the pavilions - / I, yearning and joking.

In the tradition of Platonic and Romantic duality, the two principles of being appear as essence and appearance, truth and its "distorted echo"; In Kuzmin, the symbolism of the material world as "shadows of ideas", as reflections of the eternal and primary Being, is supplemented by another: the two forms of the One are temporarily separated, they are waiting for the coming "synthesis" (cf. collections of Vyach. Ivanova "Pilot stars" 1903 and "Transparency" 1904): But in the sky is a blue bottom / I will look with an earthly smile; Ah, the sky is high-only a bottomless depth; Look up at the sky vault: all the luminaries! / Bend down over the cup of waters: all luminaries!

Whole poems are built on antonymic pairs, and the object of their description is ambiguous phenomena, such as:

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love or sofia:

Eros, the youngest of all the gods

And the oldest of all the gods,

Eros, you are the most gentle koval,

Looser of all shackles.

(...) A boy born before the age,

Now it is being born.

A boy who was first conceived,

conceived!

All that the finished ones dreamed of before the century,

vvek does not end!

flowing, stationary,

lying down, flowing,

gold and dark

fragmented and whole,

native and incomprehensible,

the blind prophetess,

stagnant desire.

So, the use of antonymous expressions indicates the poet's perception of reality in all its contradictory complexity. It is no accident that Kuzmin idolized Mozart's work, who could see "the invasion of the almighty demiurge" behind the "ridiculous props of buffoonery" (Chicherin G. V. Mozart. Research etude, L., 1973, p. 225). Chicherin's statement about Mozart can, without a doubt, be applied to Kuzmin's poetic work:".. .what distinguishes him [Mozart] from all other composers is the combination of cosmism and real life, orgiastic universality and concrete psychological truth in an organic fusion..."(Edict op. p. 243).

Kuzmin attributes the property of antinomianism to music. Here's how he describes the orchestra playing (it's about the final bars of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde)::

When to every sound and thought

Rises, loving, counterweight:

The clarinet horn says,

In the arms of the harp the flute sleeps,

A mourning trombone is playing -

The dead enjoy it.

The phenomenon of antonymy also underlies the oxymoron, in which the creation of a new concept is made by combining words that contrast in meaning: I burn, but I don't burn; holy poverty and merry hunger.

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The same object is modeled simultaneously in two opposite categories;

And repeat the lowered eyebrows

About the most ancient, unprecedented Novi.

The situation is different in the following lines:

We know that everything is perishable / Only mutability is unchangeable.

In this context, there is a mysterious and otherwise unspeakable third category (mutable immutability). It is possible to assume that it is not this category itself that is significant, but its elusive nature.

So: the irreconcilability of the components of an oxymoron leads either to a bifurcation of the subject of the statement, or to the construction of extra-rational categories, which, in turn, allow us to build a world that is inaccessible to the understanding of the ordinary human mind.

The classical type of oxymoron has another property: its internal inconsistency leads to a change in the meaning of any of its components, to metaphorization. So, the phrase: You see with blind eyes / My eyes are not blind, which leads us to assume that either the word see or the word blind is not used in their direct meaning. The text is constructed in such a way that, indeed, Kuzminsky's hero sees not physiologically, but spiritually.

The use of the same word in different grammatical forms leads to the same semantic doubling:

Only three heard the fallen one cry out, / Only three saw the fallen one fall.

The words from the first line fallen and shouted "exchange" semantic and grammatical properties. In the second line, the verb forms the form of the actual past participle shouted, and from the participle-the verb form fell.

The words fallen and shouted are mutually defined, varying and intensifying each other's meanings. In this case, Kuzmin uses the method of changing the observation frame. In the context, the observer's position changes relative to the actual actant (the person indicated by the verb) of the described situation. The focus of the reader's attention is shifted from one action - shouted to another-fell.

In other cases, the poet, changing the grammatical and lexical form of the word, shows the volume of the situation: Loving, love and beloved; Whose dead, dead face...

Changes to the observation frame are also found in attribute structures: The sun is far from the lush summer heat, / Pines and firs are far from the hot summer - the main and dependent word (summer and heat) changes places. Such a "reversible" trope is defined in the first stro-

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fe is the sun, and in the second - pine trees (it is impossible not to notice that these words are in a state of sound echoes: s-o-n). One object, one situation is considered from different angles - this is one of the syntactic and semantic ways to "expand" the poetic picture of the world.

Kuzmin also uses other lexical tools to create a multidimensional world.

So, one poem from the cycle "gazely" is built on the opposition of different communicative roles of a person. Kuzmin once again reminds that life is changeable and fickle, and it is not known where you will find, where you will lose: I am the customer, you are the merchant: we are stuck with this exchange. / You're a passerby, I'm a singer: we're stuck with my exchange. Catching or stopping a moment is almost impossible. It is only necessary to try to describe all the forms and manifestations of the elements. Which, in fact, is what the poet does:

Crystal on the old glass

Imagination imposes,

Changeable is so light!

Complex adjectives, which were actively used in the practice of symbolists, in Kuzmin characterize not only a synesthetic, but also a polar perception of the world: charming-stupid flowers of theater schools; purely vicious; After all, in every puddle there are fragments / Glassy-scarlet clouds; It's time for us to have a fiery-icy, / Frosty - hot Russian paradise!; Relaxed-life-giving melancholy / Spring for nothing I will not exchange; Some Russian, warm-sleepy poison / Makes me related to the soul of an Old Believer.

Kuzmin actively uses individual word combinations: on fat flying pigeons; shaggy star.

The interconversion and interchange of properties is the basis of Kuzmin's metamorphoses (let's not forget that the classical translation of Apuleius ' Metamorphoses was made by Kuzmin). For example, in a 1924 poem, a cat turns into a lion and vice versa:

So the ether will become a storm,

Storm of Undead Aether Current,

Cat by lion and cat by lion.

The idea of exchange from the syntactic, semantic, and finally logical levels is also transferred to the plot level:

Sometimes in the chest of one [person]

it turns out two hearts,

then both fly to the other chest,

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like Mexican birds.

If their hands meet,

it seems,

what goes from finger to finger

heat and blood flow.

(...)

Blood drips softly into glasses:

Exchange sign and security sign.

In the 1920s, Kuzmin's contrasting world takes on the features of uncertainty. In this regard, it is impossible not to consider such a technique as the use of question sentences, in which the intended answers are already given. The author invites the reader to co-create: choose possible behaviors:

The meaning of your commands is unclear:

Break down, curse, fight?

Location options:

The golden banners are lowered

(In the heart, in the water, in the reeds?)

Are the stars visible in the well, or in the sky?

All of a sudden

light and warm, like a breath, voice

(from the valley, from the sky?) he sang it...

The considered contradictory constructions are a mechanism in the poet's literary text that develops either qualitatively new modeling categories, or reinterprets existing categories.

Kuzmin's linguistic paradoxes find their roots in the paradoxical instability of life itself:

Here everything became shaky and fragile,

Capricious, changeable, like life.

(...)

A steady peace is like death.

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